Reflections from a voluntary exile.

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_Recess / Deep breathe and carry on

I rarely write nowadays.

This is not kept in secret but again who would really like to read about it or listen to it, rather? I am starting to think that adulthood is this kind of constant mess inside your head trying to figure out things that before were just a given, and then you figure something out and realise that you have left something very fucking important in the way.

The struggle is more or less OK to live with, but it doesn’t react well to external stimuli. Any kind of poking does indeed go down the hard route. Sometimes it is physical pain, sometimes is tiredness, others, this feeling in the gut. This feeling used to be just teenager anger, but now, it actually wounds the flesh of the abdominal area, creating actual injuries. No, this is not a metaphor.

Anyway, that anger used to be caused by the things that I couldn’t achieve. Now, on the other hand, it belongs more in the plethora of feelings provoked by the utter fear of losing something that I have, rather. This is one of my latest realisations. This is what I am on about here. As adult, pretty much everything is achievable – OK, at least as a young adult, living a modern, standard life in the developed world .(Yep, I am not foolish enough to ignore that this very text and the ones produced by me in the last 10 years are pretty much made up problems. I also know that this fact doesn’t make the problems go away).

If you want something you can trade money for, you buy it. If you want something you can achieve by making an effort, you do it. You might need to save or fight your laziness, but the chance lays there waiting for something to happen. Now, the things we may lose – and that we really want – these are the ones that give us the most grief: material things? For some, maybe. Everyone have things that they wouldn’t like to lose. Some have sentimental value, others are just expensive. Maybe most could be replaced. But what about the other things?

Maybe… your social appeal? Stopping being one of the players of the office to be part of the settled down group? What does that do for you, you should ask yourself. I can tell you know, that without experiencing the struggle, fantasizing about it won’t really do it.

What about your friends? Some people require tens of them in order to be fine. My theory is that they need to be distracted from themselves. I am not the best person to critisize this, to be honest. Although comfortable with myself, I must admit that from time to time I feel forced to slow my brain down, for my own safety. One cannot always just pound it with a six pack everytime things get a bit out of track.

I have taken a minute to read that last sentence. Yes – although I don’t think I have never been an alcoholic, I might have done a few silly things in the past. What can I say – it doesn’t really help. It’s all just a little game that can get too serious too quickly. I was thinking about it today, actually. I might have been well past the limits of common sense, and even found some kind of calm in that fact. What a twisted assertion.

Coming back to the topic, what about losing your loved one? What does that mean? I didn’t intend to sound so dramatic: the loss could be simply The Other Person losing interest. So you lose a person you love. And how is this different from going through that in your teens? Why am I saying that back then it was really not being able to be with that person, and now it is that you lose that person?

The thing is that it is not different. The effect in your body is as shitty as it would have been 10 – 15 years ago.

There is a main difference that supports the semantic rearrangement: you actually know what you are losing.